Today started messing with one of the new Intel servers. We're still waiting on drives to ship before doing much with it, but at least it boots off of DVD. There are some other kinks to work out as well. I think we're going to call it "mork." We hope to at least replace sidious with this machine, and if we get the other servers working, than replace others. In general we always wish to reduce the hardware we need to maintain - i.e. have less machines doing more stuff. However, we'd like to do so without increasing our single points of failure (redundancy is nice). And given we never buy anything we have to generally stick to a "work with what you got" philosophy.

A small note about the front page "weekly outage" status - that's a line at the top of our project_news data file which is commented out. Every Tuesday morning I uncomment it (if I remember to) so people can see it, and hopefully later that day (if I remember to) I comment it back into oblivion. Sometimes I forget, or recovery is slow enough that I keep that warning there so people can get some idea why they're having trouble connecting. In any case, it's human controlled and therefore prone to error.

- Matt-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

Matt, would it not be better to make the maintenance notice permanent. It may even be a good idea to expand it a bit to warn of communication problems after the servers are back on. It could serve as an advisory to new users of what to expect every week and might reduce the number of posts inquiring why they have problem contacting the project.
Boinc V7.2.42
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB, GTX470

Matt, would it not be better to make the maintenance notice permanent. It may even be a good idea to expand it a bit to warn of communication problems after the servers are back on. It could serve as an advisory to new users of what to expect every week and might reduce the number of posts inquiring why they have problem contacting the project.

They can just link to this page as they've atleast ocassionally done before...

Seeing how it doesn't even show e.g. CEST (Central European Summer Time), it may be better to link to something like Time&Date Worldclock. Of course, then you need to know where approximately you are according to those cities and that Berkeley lies in San Francisco to compare against. ;)Jord

According to Giorgo of the Ancient Astronaut Theorists I do not help with tech questions via private message. He's right: please use the forums for that.

They can just link to this page as they've atleast ocassionally done before...

Seeing how it doesn't even show e.g. CEST (Central European Summer Time), it may be better to link to something like Time&Date Worldclock. Of course, then you need to know where approximately you are according to those cities and that Berkeley lies in San Francisco to compare against. ;)

Yep.
Which is why i reckon what's done now is as good a method of informing people as any.Grant
Darwin NT

Lets not over complicate the issue searching for perfection, no matter what is done there will always be some who get it wrong - nature of life. Most people on the internet are comfortable with Time Zones, its not any real issue.

Just adopt the standard protocol and express it as GMT or UTC. Most know their time zone relative to GMT/UTC, and if they dont they soon get it, its not rocket science.

One in a hundred will never get it no matter what system is adopted, its life, meanwhile the other 99 get information better and quicker than before, which can only be a good thing.

None seems to be in line with having anything to do with time-zones in Australia...

CST Central Standard Time = UTC +09:30. EST, WST/ Eastern, Western.

EST & CST generally, particularly if the writer is American, refer to North American Time Zones... and are UTC -4 & -5, respectively. I believe that the Aussie Time zones are usually abbreviated "CAST", "EAST" and "WAST" to prevent this confusion. (for ___ Australian Standard Time, the ___ being Central, Eastern, and Western...). Hello, from Albany, California!...